Friday, July 31, 2015

Earlier this week, the popular game show Jeopardy! hit home for us. One of the $1,000 "answers" was, "This Ivy League College's Rauner Special Collections Library is the home to the Robert Frost Collection." The question, naturally, was "What is Dartmouth College." We love the concept, and hope that for someone, somewhere, we are the answer to that question. We have a vision of somebody far from Dartmouth being asked by a friend,"What is Dartmouth College?" and the first response is a reference to Rauner Library. You see, we overshadow all of the other achievements of the College!

Alas, it is not a likely answer: Dartmouth is multifaceted and it would be hard to come up with a phase that answers the question, but for now, we will take Jeopardy's.

We were a bit dismayed that none of the contestants got the right question. I guess they are not regular readers of our blog and missed these posts:

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

While exploring the Dartmouth College Archives, I
stumbled upon a packing list for an officer going to Europe to fight in WWI in
the papers of Harry Goodall 1898.. At Dartmouth, Goodall was a member of Kappa
Kappa Kappa fraternity. He went to Harvard Medical School, and appears to have
been very ambitious, as he opened his own private practice in 1904 and was a
professor of Chemistry and Medicine at Harvard until 1917.

Goodall began as a contract surgeon with the Army
in August of 1917 but was commissioned as a Major in the Medical Corps on
October 20 of the same year. In 1918, Goodall was sent down to Camp Greene, in North
Carolina, where in March the Spanish Flu had broken out. Following Camp Greene,
Goodall was sent to Camp Wheeler, in Georgia, where he complained about the
conditions of the hospital and food, saying in one document, “The place [was]
not very clean. The mess [was] frightful [and] the food [was] often unfit for
use.”
Soon
after, though, he was sent to France to work in Base Hospital 51 where, in his diary, he described the commanding
officer as “a man totally unfit to command...He lacked medical
knowledge...He never appeared in any capacity aside from that of a cheap
politician...After the Armistice he was sent home for discharge for
inefficiency.”

Goodall appears to have experienced culture
shock in France, and complained that the “toilet facilities were anything but
American” and described how the French contractors would empty the toilet cans
with their bare hands, saying, “this was one thing that perhaps made me
disgusted with the French although there were many things of similar nature
that would make it impossible for an American to ever understand the French.” In October, Goodall moved to Base Hospital 87 and gained command of 2,000 beds. Here, there were many cases of the flu, but
Goodall was proud that he was able to take precautions to avoid tremendous
mortalities. The Army was sufficiently impressed with Goodall to send him back
to Base Hospital 51 to control the situation there.

Though Goodall’s story itself is fascinating,
and detailed wonderfully in his diary, the most interesting document I found among his papers was this packing list. On one page it details
everything the Army deemed necessary for a soldier to take to France. At
the bottom of the page, they claim that, “[t]his includes everything.” My
favorite section of the list is “Articles suggested but not required,” which
includes the seeming necessities of toothpaste, soap, bath towel, and toilet
paper (apparently the army was less than concerned with personal hygiene). My
favorite part of this list is that between the items of handkerchiefs and
pocketknife is the entry “housewife.” Apparently for an officer going to France in 1918,
a housewife was included on the packing list as a recommended item.